A blog full of bits of historical information, comments & observations, photographs (old and new), oddball ramblings and other totally random stuff.

Friday, September 5, 2014

FORGIVE ME, COUSIN JESSIE...

I spent a couple of days looking at the Sepia
Saturday prompt – the photo of the hurdy-gurdy man and his little monkey –
wondering where I’d seen it before.

I
knew I hadn’t, of course.

But
there was something familiar about it, something that just grabbed me by the
neck and wouldn’t let go. I thought about it all Thursday and Friday morning
while doing errands, doing laundry, cleaning house.

I
kept going back to my computer to look again at the photo. It wasn’t the man in
his soft hat and jacket (with lovely hands), and it wasn’t the little girl with
her handkerchief balled up in her fist and her arm pulled tight across her
chest...

...it
was the monkey.

It was something about the monkey.

And then I remembered.

I
went dashing up the stairs to the second floor closet where the boxes of family
photos are stashed, and went to work, and found what I was looking for inside
of ten minutes.

This is a photograph of my grandfather’s
cousin, Jessie Collins Gould, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1885;
she’s on the back porch of the family cottage in East Boothbay, sitting in a
rocker in her white summer dress – all lace and frill – with a locket around
her neck and a white hat perched jauntily on her head.

I have a couple of favorite authors who always have an unexpected twist at the end of the story but you are right up there with them. I just wasn't expecting that end. It came right out of left field !! I now knight you Deb Twistintheend Gould !!

At last!

In the early 1800s, five families settle on the Eastern River in Pittston, Maine. Together, they build a strong and lasting agricultural neighborhood based on New England values of community and reciprocity. Both fiction and social history, The Eastern flows through the experiences and truths we share with those who have lived before us.